During those years I’ve been looking at different scenarios, I’ve to admit not always in-line with the Tor Ethical Research Guidelines, posting various ideas on tor-talk mailing list, irc channel and opening up single trac ticketing features.

In particular the following tickets has been opened for this specific purposes:

Divert non-whitelisted traffic back into Tor network with 1-hop link trough a high speed gateway

Those methods could enable volunteers to run Tor Exit Relay rather than just Tor Relay with no-exit policy also on budget VPS. Budget VPSs usually provide a tons of bandwidth but disconnect and block your account after the very first abuses related to your IP touch their ticketing system, and for that reason it’s nearly impossible to run Tor Exit Relay on it.

Each of the steps previously defined can now be technically experimented thanks to the new OutboundBindAddressExit settings that would enable to “manipulate” (but with a good intention) Tor Exit Traffic easily.

Very particular care should be taken by defining in advance how to avoid disrupting Tor Exit traffic and determining if it effectively happened and why.

That experimenting should be done by publishing transparently what’s being done and where, because manipulating Tor Exit Traffic is against any Tor Community Standards or Ethics Research Guideline.

The effective willingness to do that experiments means accepting critics and incorporating each of the critics back into the hacking of the methodology being tested.

It also means accepting that the Tor Directory Authority operators may just find this behaviour unacceptable and by majority of consensus promote to block and kick-out that Tor Exit Relay from the Tor Network.

I’d love that people would pick it up the various challenges posed by those kind of setup and start testing it. Otherwise with enough Sundays, I’ll do that and document success and failures! :-)

Ah, that’s a blog post done in 2017 with my last blog post being from 2011…. maybe I’m getting back writing thoughts on blog rather than spending those time on social media?

Opening hardware, opening software, opening protocol demonstrate the weakness of any kind of proprietary method or process to build-up communication and security technologies.

It should be the goal of any scientists to try to open-up and crack any kind of proprietary and closed technology to force the industry to goes on only with interoperable and open approach while designing telecommunication protocols.

Early this year i decided that’s time to run a TOR exit node so i brought a VPS at hetzner.de (because they are listed as a Good TOR ISP)and setup the exit-node with nickname privacyresearch.infosecurity.ch with a 100Mbit/s connection for first 1TB of monthly data, then 10MBit/s flat.

Then, because i am italian, i decided to avoid my TOR node to connect to the Italian internet address space in order to reduce the chance that a stupid prosecutor would wake me up at morning because did not understand that i am running a TOR node.

We went to open a ticket to report the crash about our attempt to block TOR exit policy by country and found a similar attempt where we contributed, but it still seems to be an open-issue.

The conclusion is that it’s not possible to make a Country Exit Policy for TOR exit node in a clean and polite way so i decided to go the dirty way by using iptables/geoip . After fighting to make it compile properly, it was one line of iptables to block traffic going to italy:

Now from my exit-node no connection to italian networks will be done and i am safe against possibly stupid prosecutors not understanding TOR (i have an exception for all TOR node ip address applied before).

After some other days i started to receive complains due to portscan activities originated from my tor nodes.

From my own point of view i want to support anonymity network, not anonymous hacking attempt and so i want to filter-out portscan and attacks from originating from my node.That’s a complex matter that require some study, so in the meantime i installed scanlogd and snort because i want to evaluate how many attacks, which kind of attacks are getting out from my TOR exit node.
Later i will try to arrange some kind of filtering to be sure to be able to filter out major attacks.
For what’s related to portscan it seems that there are no public tools to detect and filter outgoing portscan but only to filter incoming portscan so probably will need to write something ad-hoc.
I will refer how things are going and if there will be some nice way to implement in a lightwave way snort-inline to selectively filter-out major attack attempt originating from my exit-node.

My goal is to keep an exit node running in long-term (at least 1TB of traffic per months donated to TOR), reducing the effort related to ISP complain and trying to do my best to run the exit-node with a reasonable liability.

It’s the TETRA version of GSM airprobe that unlock access to the data and frame of TETRA communication protocol, thus giving great hacking opportunity!

Now that also TETRA technology has been opened we should expect, during this 2011, to see opensource TETRA sniffers and most probably also TEA encryption (the Tetra Encryption Algorithm) cracked!

TETRA is used by Police, Emergency Services and Militaries as an alternative mobile communication network that can works even without the availability of network coverage (only mobile-to-mobile without a base station) and provide some special high availability services.

Have a look at Open Data government 2.0 initiative to enforce government transparency, reducing corruption and improving performance of government organization.

That revolution it’s just more than a group of anarco-libertarian funky guys that want to create chaos by spreading secrets, it’s just the start of the rush to achieve new organization model of governments by leveraging complete transparency and strong cooperation with citizens.

ZORG has been originally developed and implemented in PrivateWave’s PrivateGSM voice encryption products available for the following platforms: Blackberry, Nokia and iOS (iPhone) .

Zorg C++ has been integrated with PJSIP open source VoIP SDK [2] and it’s provided as integration patch against PJSIP 1.8.5. It has been tested on iPhone, Symbian, Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Zorg Java has been integrated within a custom version of MJSIP [3] open source SDK on Blackberry platform and it includes memory usage optimizations required to reduce at minimum garbage collector activity.

Both platforms have separated and modular cryptographic back-ends so that the cryptographic algorithms implementation could be easily swapped with other ones.

We are releasing it under open source and in coherence with our approach to security [4] as we really hope that it can be useful for the open source ecosystem to create new voice encryption systems in support of freedom of speech.

More than 20 pjsip-based open source VoIP encryption software and several written in Java could directly benefit from ZORG release.

We would be happy to receive proposal of cooperation, new integration, new cryptographic back-ends, bug scouting and whatever useful to improve and let ZRTP affirm as voice encryption standard.

At PrivateWave we use a different approach respect to most voice encryption company out there, read our approach to security .

The relevance of this products in the technology and industry landscape can be summarized as follow:

It’s the first voice encryption company using only standards security protocols (and we expect the market will react, as it’s clear that proprietary tech coming from the heritage of CSD cannot provide same value)

It’s the first approach in voice encryption to use only open source & standard encryption engine

It’s the first voice encryption approach to provide different security model using different technologies (end-to-end for ZRTP and end-to-site for SRTP)

Those suite of Mobile Secure Clients, designed for professional security use only using best telecommunication and security technologies, provide a high degree of protection along with good performance also in bad network conditions:

Those are the results of hard work of all my very skilled staff (16 persons worked on this 6 projects for 3 different platforms) on challenging technologies (voice encryption) in a difficult operating environment (dirty mobile networks and dirty mobile operating systems) for more than 2 years.

I am very proud of our staff!

What next?

In next weeks you will see releasing of major set of documentations such as integration with asterisks, freeswitch and other Security Enabled PBX, along with some exciting other security technology news that i am sure will be noticed ;)

It has been an hard work and more have to be done but i am confident that the security and opensource community will like such products and our transparent approach also with open important releases and open source integration that make a very politically neutral (backdoor free) technology.

There are a lot of reason why one would need to access internet trough a VPN.

For example if you live in a country blocking certain contents (like anti-local-government website, porn, etc) and/or protocols (like skype, voip) you would probably want to move your internet connectivity outside the nasty blocking country by using encrypted VPN tunnels.

I evaluated several hosted VPN server and a couple of them sounds quite good among the widespread offering of such services:

Most modern crypto use Elliptic Curve Cryptographic (ECC) that, with a smaller key size and reduce computation power, give equivalent security strength of traditional crypto system known as DH (Diffie-Hellman) or RSA (Rivest, Shamir and Adleman) .

Not everyone knows that ECC encryption is selected for any future encryption applications and that even TLS/SSL (encryption used for securing the web) is moving to ECC.

I found plenty of so called “proprietary encryption products” which abandoned RSA and DH to goes with ECC alternatives, that tend to arbitrary use ECC bit key size without even specifying which kind of ECC crypto get used.

However there is a lot of confusion around Elliptic Curves, with a lot of different names and key size making difficult for a non-cryptographically-experienced-user to make your own figure when evaluating some crypto stuff.

Because of so diffused confusion i decided to make my own analysis to find out which are the best ECC encryption curves and right ECC key size to use.

This analysis would like to provide a security industry based choice among various curves and key sizes, leaving the mathematical and crypto analytical considerations that has been already been done during the years, summarizing the various choices taken in several standards and security protocols.

First the conclusion.

From my analysis only the following ECC curves are to be considered for use in encryption systems because are the only one selected among different authorities (ANSI, NSA, SAG, NIST, ECC BrainPool), different security protocol standards (IPSec, OpenPGP, ZRTP, Kerberos, SSL/TLS) and the only one matching NSA Suite B security requirements (de-facto standard also for NATO military environment):

Elliptic Prime Curve 256 bit – P-256

Elliptic Prime Curve 384 bit – P-384

with optional, just for really paranoid that want to get more key size bit, still not considered useful:

Elliptic Prime Curve 521 bit – P-521

I would like to state that Koblitz curves should be avoided, in any key size (163 / 283 / 409 / 571) as they does not have enough warranty on crypto analytic activity and effectively they are:

Not part of NSA Suite-B cryptography selection

Not part of ECC Brainpool selection

Not part of ANSI X9.62 selection

Not part of OpenPGP ECC extension selection

Not part of Kerberos extension for ECC curve selection

I invite the reader to follow trough my analysis to understand the fundamentals that could be understood even without deep technical background but at least with a good technological background a some basic bit of cryptography.

Here we go with the analysis

My goal is to make an analysis on what/how the open scientific and security community choose ECC crypto system for usage in security protocols and standards defined by IETF RFC (the ones who define Internet Standards in a open and peer-reviewed way).

Below a set of RFC introducing ECC into existing system that get analyzed to understand what’s better to use and what’s better to exclude:

We will use the choice made by scientist defining Internet Security Protocols to make part of our evaluation.
Additionally it must be understood that the Curve selection comes from different authorities that made their own selection of Curves in order to tell to the industry what to use and what to skip:

US NIST (US National Institute of Standards) with 186-2 (recently superseded in 2009 by the new 186-3)

We will use the choice made by scientist defining security requirements in the standardization agencies to make part of our evaluation.
Additionally, something that most people does not know, but that it’s extremely relevant to our analysis, is that there are different kind of ECC curve cryptography and their “size” it’s different depending on the kind of curve:

ECC Curves over Prime Field (often referred as Elliptic Curve and represented by P-keysize)

ECC Curves over Binary Field (often referred as Koblitz Curve and represented by K-keysize)

Given a security strength equivalence the Elliptic Curve and the Kobliz Curve have different key size, for example when we read ECC 571 we are referring to Koblitz Curve with an equivalent strength to ECC 521 Prime curve.

What immediately appear is that there are only two curves selected by all authorities, and that there is a general dumping of koblitz curves by ANSI.The only commonly agreed among the 3 authorities are the following two ECC curve:

secp192r1 / prime192v1 / NIST P-192

secp256r1 / prime256v1 / NIST P-256

Of those selection of ECC curve for TLS the RFC5430 skipped completely koblitz curves and selected for usage only:

P-256, P-384, P-521

The ECC Brainpool skipped completely Koblitz curves and selected for usage the following ECC Curves:

P-160, P-192, P-224, P-256, P-320, P-384, P-512 (that’s the only particular because it’s not P-521 but P-512, the only key-size referred by ECC brainpool. Tnx Ian Simons from Athena SCS)

The OpenPGP internet draft for ECC usage in PGP draft-jivsov-openpgp-ecc-06 skipped completely Koblitz curves and selected the following ECC curves

P-256, P-384, P-521

The Kerberos protocol extension for ECC use, defined in RFC5349 and defined by Microsoft for smartcard logon skipped completely Koblitz curves and selected the following ECC curves:

P-256, P-384, P-521

So, sounds clear that the right selection of ECC is for P-256, P-384 and P-521 while the Koblitz curve have been skipped for Top Secret use and for any security sensitive protocol (IPSec, OpenPGP, ZRTP, Kerberos, SSL/TLS).

Why i made this analysis?

I have done this analysis following a discussion i had regarding certain voice encryption products, all based on custom and proprietary protocols, that are all using Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman 571 bit / ECDH 571 / 571-bit ECDH / Koblitz 571 bits .
All them are using the K-571 that, as described before, has been removed from all security sensitive environment and protocols and being myself a designer of voice encryption stuff i think that their cryptographic choice is absolutely not the best security choice.
Probably it has been done just for marketing purpose, because K-571 (Koblitz curve) seems stronger than P-521 (Elliptic curve based on Prime number). If you have “more bit” your marketing guys can claim to be “more secure”. Koblitz elliptic curve are faster than the top secret enabled prime elliptic curve and so give the product manager a chance to provide “more bit” in it’s own product while keeping the key exchange fast.

It’s a matter of philosophical choice.

I prefer to follow the trend of scientific community with the humility of not to considering myself a cryptographic expert, knowledgable more than the overall security and scientific community itself.

I prefer instead to use only algorithms that are approved for use in highly sensitive environments (top secret classification), that have been selected by all the authorities and working group analyzing encryption algorithms existing out-there and that represent the choice of almost all standard security protocols (IPSec, OpenPGP, ZRTP, Kerberos, SSL/TLS, etc).
I prefer to count the amount of brains working on the crypto i use, that check that’s really secure, that evaluate whether there’s some weakness.

The number of brais working on Crypto widely diffused are of order of magnitude more than the number of brains working on crypto used by just few people (like Koblitz curve).
So i am not demonizing who use ECDH 571 using Koblitz Curve, but for sure i can affirm that they did not taken the best choice in terms of security and that any security professionals doing a security benchmarking would consider the fact that Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman 571 bit done with Koblitz Curve is not widely diffused, it’s dumped from standard security protocols and it’s not certified for top secret use.

SDR approach is a revolutionary system that’s completely changing the way scientist and industry is approach any kind of wireless technology.

Basically instead of burning hardware chip that implement most of the radio frequency protocols and techniques, they are pushed in “software” to specialized radio hardware that can work on a lot of different frequency, acting as radio interface for a lot of different radio protocols.

For example the USRP (Universal Software Radio Peripheral) from Ettus Research that cost 1000-2000USD fully loaded, trough the opensource GnuRadio framework, have seen opensource implementation of:

That kind of new approach to Radio Transmission System is destinated to change the way radio system are implemented, giving new capability such as to upgrade the “radio protocol itself” in software in order to provide “radio protocol” improvements.

We can expect that other technologies, weak by design but protected by the restriction to hardware devices to hack the low level protocols, will be soon get hacked. In the first list i would really like to see the hacking of TETRA, a technology born with closed mindset and secret encryption algorithms, something i really dislike ;-)

I had to better understand the concepts, roles and duties related to Product management and Product marketing management in software companies, why are needed, which are the differences and how they fit inside an organization structure.

Most person i know never interested into this specific area of work, but when you want to be a product company (and not a consulting or solution company), you start having different products on different platforms for different target customers sold trough different channels with different pricing with a installation/different delivery process and that complexity must be managed in the proper way.

You realize that in order to let the product company grow in the right direction you need to organize product management activities formally, not closing your mind in rigid organization roles such as Marketing, Sales, R&D.

When we speak about Product Management i recommend the reading of the illuminating The strategic role of Product Management (How a market-driven focus leads companies to build products people want to buy) that clarify a lot of things, even if it outlook net separation of roles in product management, something that’s too heavy for a small company like a startup.

Still it provide a differentiation of duties between Product Management and Product Marketing.

A good understanding of the product management related to startup is given in the article Creating Product Management at Startup showing up different case related to the roles of the product visionary into the company.

It introduce the terms ceo of the product in the sense that the product management duties jump around into the various organization function by providing focus and effort where it’s needed, independently from the fact that the internal function requiring more effort is Development, Marketing, Sales or Communication. That’s means practically enhancing the product vision as it’s needed across all major product-related functions making the vision corporate-wide coherent.

A good representation of product management and product marketing activities is well described with the differentiation of between Strategical, Technical and Marketing sector and is not clearly separated between Management, Marketing(and Sales) and R&D :

An illuminating (for me) and very important differentiation regarding product management duties is the differentiation between:

Product Management

Product Marketing

The specific duties belonging to ProductMarketing vs Management are greatly explained in Role Definitions For Product Management and Product Marketing that i suggest to read, letting you to better define tasks and responsibilities across your organization. It also provide a good definition of job requirements if you need to look for that figure!

At the same time it’s important to understand which professional figure is NOT itself a product manager:

Product manager is not a marketing manager – while product management is usually seen as a marketing discipline, marketers are focused on the marketing plan and are usually not driving the overall product direction. In that context could however be found Product marketing manager that’s the arms of the marketing of the product, especially in small organization.

Product manager isnot a sales manager – sales manager are about finding out how to sell a product, following which sales methodology, technique and channels and they could drive the company from a market oriented company (product) to a customer oriented company (solution and consulting)

Product manager is not a developer – Developers are focused on the technology and not the overall product. Some great product managers are former developers, but it is difficult to do both at once. There is a natural tension between developers and product managers that should be maintained to create a balanced product.

Product manager is not a software manager – the software manager is a functional manager and usually not focused on the product or the customers.

Product manager isnot a project manager – project managers are about how and when, while the product manager is about what. Project managers work closely with product managers to ensure successful completion of different phases in the product life cycle.

The typical product management activities could be in extreme synthesis summarized as follow:

Product management so it’s not precisely development, is not precisely marketing, it’s not precisely sales, so typically it’s difficult to identify “where it should stay” inside the organization structure (it’s even difficult to understand that’s needed)?

It’s relevant to be careful not to have persons that are too much technical or too much sales oriented in order to fill the gap among different organization. Too much fragmentation of assigned duties across the organization may lead to bureaucracy, too much duties on one person may lead to ineffective implementation of needed tasks in some area and to a internal competition perception respect to the traditional roles.

Check there a very nice Resume of a professional with practical experience in product management (it’s an half techie/half marketing guys).

Ah! Another very common misunderstanding is to confusemarketing with communication where a i found a so good definition of Marketing that i really like and understand for strict relationship with Product Management:

Marketing is know the market so well that the product sell itself

But what happen when you don’t handle a product management and product marketing management process in a defined way?

Your founder, a brilliant technician, started the company years ago when he quit his day job to market his idea full time. He created a product that he just knew other people needed. And he was right. Pretty soon he delivered enough of the product and hired his best friend from college as VP of Sales. And the company grew. But before long, the VP of Sales complained, “We’re an engineering-led company. We need to become customer-driven.” And that sounded fine. Except… every new contract seemed to require custom work. You signed a dozen clients in a dozen market segments and the latest customer’s voice always dominated the product plans. You concluded that “customer-driven” meant “driven by the latest customer” and that couldn’t be right.

If you want to be a product company it’s relevant to precisely follow a strategy driven by product marketing and management and not by sales.

Confusion between duties of product management/marketing and sales could lead to unsuccessful product company that are not able to proceed within their strategy, simply because they getting opportunities that drive the business out-of-scope.

A product company must invest in it’s own product development and marketing in order to let sales activity stay focused and guarantee that the organization is every day more effective on the market.

After this reading, my understanding is that it’s relevant to identify how to create a set of flexible business process on how to handle various product management and product marketing duties separating them from sales.

i made a talk about voice communication security technologies at University of Trento following an interesting information exchange with Crypto Lab managed Professor Massimiliano Sala .

I suggest interested people to read it, especially the second part, as there is an innovative categorization of the various voice encryption technologies that get used in several sectors.

I tried to explain and get out from this widely fragmented technological sector by providing a wide overview on technologies that usually are absolutely unrelated one-each-other but practically they all apply to voice encryption following that categorization:

Especially i like the concept of Chocolate grade encryption that want to provide some innovation on the Snake Oil Encryption concept.

But i need to get more in depth about the Chocolate grade encryption context, will probably do before end-of-year by providing an applied course on understanding and evaluating practically the real security context of various voice encryption technologies.

It’s interesting to notice that WiFi cracking had a similar story, as the first WiFi wep cracking discovery was quite slow in earlier techniques but later Korek, an hacker working on cracking code, improve the attack system drammatically.

That’s the story of security research cooperation, you start a research, someone follow it and improve it, some other follow it and improved it and at the end you get the result.

Security market grow, more companies goes to the market, but how many of them are taking seriously what they do?

You know, doing security technology mean that you are personally responsible for the protection of the user’s information. You must make them aware of what they need, exactly what your are doing and which kind of threat model your product protect.

A typical problem of product’s security features is represented by the inability of the user to evaluate the security claims of the product itself.

So there’s a lot companies doing a not-so-ethical marketing of security features, based on the facts that no user will be able to evaluate it.

The previously explained situation reside in the security topic of Snake Oil Encryption, an evolution in the scientific cryptographic environment that let us today use best of breed information protection technologies without having to worry too much about backdoors or insecurities.

Let’s speak about Snake Oil Encryption

Snake Oil Cryptography : In cryptography, snake oil is a term used to describe commercial cryptographic methods and products which are considered bogus or fraudulent. Distinguishing secure cryptography from insecure cryptography can be difficult from the viewpoint of a user. Many cryptographers, such as Bruce Schneier and Phil Zimmermann, undertake to educate the public in how secure cryptography is done, as well as highlighting the misleading marketing of some cryptographic products.

The most referenced crypto security guru, Philip Zimmermann and Bruce Schneier, was the 1st to talk about Snake Oil Encryption:

Several snake oil security product companies does not explain and are not clear about the threat model to which the product apply. Very famous is the sentence of Russ Nelson:

“Remember, crypto without a threat model is like cookies without milk. ….. Cryptography without a threat model is like motherhood without apple pie. Can’t say that enough times. More generally, security without a threat model is by definition going to fail.”

By checking that points it’s possible to evaluate how serious an encryption technology or product is.

But all in all how to fix that unethical security approach?

It’s very significative and it would be really useful for each kind of security product category to make some strongly and independent evaluation guideline (like OSSTMM for Penetration testing) , to make this security evaluation process really in the hands of the user.

It would be also very nice to have someone making analysis and evaluation of security product companies, publishing reports about Snake Oil signs.

Imho a users must not only be warned about the application capabilities and API usage but also what will do with which kind of information it’s going to handle inside the mobile phone.

Capabilities means authorizing the application to use a certain functionalities, for example to use GeoLocation API, but what the application will do and to who will provide such information once the user have authorized it?

That’s a security profiling level that mobile phone manufacturer does not provide and they should, because it focus on the information and not on the application authorization/permission respect to the usage of device capabilities.

p.s. yes! ok! I agree! This kind of post would require 3-4 pages long discussion as the topic is hot and quite articulated but it’s saturday morning and i gotta go!

Blackberry have good and bad reputation regarding his security capability, depending from which angle you look at it.

This post it’s a summarized set of information to let the reader the get picture, without taking much a position as RIM and Blackberry can be considered, depending on the point of view, an extremely secure platform or an extremely dangerous one .

On the other side they does not provide only a device but an overlay access network, called BIS (Blackberry Internet Service), that’s a global worldwide wide area network where your blackberry enter while you browse or checkmail using blackberry.net AP.

When you, or an application, use the blackberry.net APN you are not just connecting to the internet with the carrier internet connection, but you are entering inside the RIM network that will proxy and act as a gateway to reach the internet.

The very same happen when you have a corporate use: Both the BB device and the corporate BES connect to the RIM network that act as a sort of vpn concentration network.

So basically all the communications cross trough RIM service infrastructure in encrypted format with a set proprietary encryption and communication protocols.

Just as a notice, think that google to provide gtalk over blackberry.net APN, made an agreement in order to offer service inside the BB network to the BB users. When you install gtalk you get added 3 service books that point to GTALKNA01 that’s the name of GTALK gateway inside the RIM network to allow intra-BIS communication and act as a GTALK gateway to the internet.

The mobile operators usually are not even allowed to inspect the traffic between the Blackberry device and the Blackberry Network.

So RIM and Blackberry are somehow unique for their approach as they provide a platform, a network and a service all bundled together and you cannot just “get the device and the software” but the user and the corporate are always bound and connected to the service network.

That’s good and that’s bad, because it means that RIM provide extremely good security features and capabilities to protect information, device and access to information at various level against third party.

But it’s always difficult to estimate the threat and risk related to RIM itself and who could make political pressure against RIM.

Please consider that i am not saying “RIM is looking at your data” but making an objective risk analysis: for how the platform is done RIM have authority on the device, on the information on-the-device and on the information that cross the network. (Read my Mobile Security Slides).

For example let’s consider the very same context for Nokia phones.

Once the Nokia device is sold, Nokia does not have authority on the device, nor on the information on-the-device nor on the information that cross the network. But it’s also true that Nokia just provide the device and does not provide the value added services such as the Enterprise integration (The RIM VPN tunnel), the BIS access network and all the local and remote security provisioned features that Blackberry provide.

So it’s a matter of considering the risk context in the proper way when choosing the platform, with an example very similar to choosing Microsoft Exchange Server (on your own service) or whether getting a SaaS service like Google Apps.

In both case you need to trust the provider, but in first example you need to trust Microsoft that does not put a backdoor on the software while in the 2nd example you need to trust Google, as a platform and service provider, that does not access your information.

So it’s a different paradigm to be evaluated depending on your threat model.

If your threat model let you consider RIM as a trusted third party service provider (much like google) than it’s ok. If you have a very high risk context, like top-secret one, then let’s consider and evaluate carefully whether it’s not better to keep the Blackberry services fully isolated from the device or use another system without interaction with manufacturer servers and services.

Now, let’s get back to some research and some facts about blackberry and blackberry security itself.

First of all several governments had to deal with RIM in order to force them to provide access to the information that cross their service networks while other decided to directly ban Blackberry usage for high officials because of servers located in UK and USA, while other decided to install their own backdoors.

Because it’s 23.32 (GMT+1), i am tired, i think that this post will end up here.

I hope to have provided the reader a set of useful information and consideration to go more in depth in analyzing and considering the overall blackberry security (in the good and in the bad, it always depends on your threat model!).

Cheers

Fabio Pietrosanti (naif)

p.s. i am managing security technology development (voice encryption tech) on Blackberry platform, and i can tell you that from the development point of view it’s absolutely better than Nokia in terms of compatibility and speed of development, but use only RIMOS 5.0+ !

It’s been 25 years since “Hackers” was published. Author Steven Levyreflects on the book and the movement.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/06/hackers-at-25.htmlSteven Levy wrote a book in the mid-1980s that introduced the term "hacker" -- the positive connotation -- to a wide audience. In the ensuing 25 years, that word and its accompanying community have gone through tremendous change. The book itself became a mainstay in tech libraries.O'Reilly recently released an updated 25th anniversary edition of "Hackers," so I checked in with Levy to discuss the book's development, its influence, and the role hackers continue to play.

I read an interesting article about putting 1.000.000 computers, given the chance for a serious botnet owner to get it, to crack RSA.

The result is that in such context attacking an RSA 1024bit key would take only 28 years, compared to theoretical 19 billion of years.

Reading of this article, is extremely interesting because it gives our very important consideration on the cryptography strength respect to the computation power required to carry on cracking attempt, along with industry approach to “default security level”.

In the ’90, closed source and proprietary cryptography was ruling the world.

That’s before open source and scientifically approved encrypted technologies went out as a best practice to do crypto stuff.

I would like to remind when, in 1992, USA along with Israel was, together with switzerland, providing backdoored (proprietary and secret) technologies to Iranian government to tap their communications, cheating them to think that the used solution was secure, making also some consideration on this today in 2010.

“Cryptography used to be an obscure science, of little relevance to everyday life. Historically, it always had a special role in military and diplomatic communications. But in the Information Age, cryptography is about political power, and in particular, about the power relationship between a government and its people. It is about the right to privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of political association, freedom of the press, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, freedom to be left alone.”

The design of this architecture allows Crypto AG to provide a secret proprietary algorithm that can be specified for each customer to assure the perfect degree of cryptographic security and optimum support for the customer’s security policy. In turn, the Security Architecture gives you the influence you need to be fully independent in respect of your encryption solution. You can determine all areas that are covered by cryptography and verify how the algorithm works.The original secret proprietary algorithm of Crypto AG is the foundation of the Security Architecture.

I have to say that their architecture is absolutely good from TLC point of view. Also they have done a very good job in making the design of the overall architecture in order to make a tamper-proof resistant crypto system by using dedicated crypto processor.
However there is still something missing:

The overall cryptographic concept is misleading, based on wrong encryption concepts.

You may think that i am a troll telling this, but given the history of Crypto AG and given the fact that all the scientific and security community does not approve security trough obscurity concepts, it would legitimate to ask ourself:

Why they are still doing security trough obscurity cryptography with secret and proprietary algorithms?

Hey, i think that they have very depth knowledge on telecommunication and security, but given that the science tell us not to follow the secrecy of algorithms, i really have serious doubt on why they are still providing proprietary encryption and does not move to standard solutions (eventually with some kind of custom enhancement).

The slides provide a wide an in-depth overview of mobile security related matters, i should be doing some slidecast about it putting also audio. Maybe will do, maybe not, it depends on time that’s always a insufficient resource.

I recently switched one of my multiple mobile phones with which i go around to iPhone.

I am particularly concerned about data protection in case of theft and so started having a look around about the iPhone provided protection system.

There is an interesting set of iPhone Business Security Features that make me think that iPhone is moving in the right path for security protection of the phone, but still a lot of things has to be done, especially for serious Enterprise and Government users.

That’s something disturbing my paranoid mindset that make me think not to use sensitive data on my iPhone if i cannot protect my data.

Probably an iPhone independent disk encryption product would be very useful in order to let the market create protection schemas that fit the different risk contexts that different users may have.

Probably a general consumer is not worried about this PIN vulnerability but for me, working within highly confidential envirnonment such as intelligence, finance and military, it’s something that i cannot accept.

As you can see Iran is doing Oil business with most big south America and Far Asia countries, with some little exception in Europe for what apply to Norway, Italy and Spain.

To me it sounds that those European countries are going to face serious trouble whether they will accept and subscribe UN sanction against Iran.

Or some of them, like Italy, are protected by the strenghtening cooperation they are doing with Russia on Energy matters?

Well, i don’t know how things will end up, but it’s possible the most hypocrit countries like the European ones doing business in Iran while applying Sanctions will be the only European winning in the international competition for Iran Oil (Unless France did not drop a nuclear bomb on theran ;) ).

It seems that the hacking community somehow like to target securstar products, maybe because hacking community doesn’t like the often revealed unethical approach already previously described in this blog by articles and user’s comments.

The exploit code has been tested against DriveCrypt 5.3, currently released DriveCrypt 5.4 is reported to be vulnerable too as it has just minor changes related to win7 compatibility. Can anyone make a double check and report a comment here?

Very good job Neil!

In the meantime the Free Truecrypt is probably the preferred choice for disk encryption, given the fact that it’s difficult to trust DriveCrypt, PGP has been acquired by Symantec and there are very bad rumors about the trust that people have in Symantec and there are not many widely available alternatives.

Rumors say that also PhoneCrypt binaries are getting analyzed and the proprietary encryption system could reveal something fun…

Quantum cryptography it’s something very challenging, encryption methods that leverage the law of phisycs to secure communications over fiber lines.

To oversimplify the system is based on the fact that if someone cut the fiber, put a tap in the middle, and joint together the other side of the fiber, the amount of “errors” that will be on the communications path will be higher than 20% .

So if QBER (Quantum Bit Error Rate) goes above 20% then it’s assumed that the system is intercepted.

Darth Vader must be heralded as the prime example of a chief executive who really didn’t care about information security. The entire board was unapproachable and clearly no system testing was undertaken. The network security was so poor that it was hacked into and the designs for the death star were stolen without anyone knowing.

Even worse than that, the death star had a major design flaw where by dropping a bomb thingy into a big hole on the outside, it actually blew up the entire thing!

Darth Vader needed to employ a good Security Consultant to sit on the executive board and promise not to force choke him. Should have commissioned a full risk assessment of the death star followed by a full penetration test. Only then should the death star have been released into the production environment.

Because security of a cryptographic system it’s not a matter of “how many bits do i use” but using the right approach to do the right thing to mitigate the defined security risk in the most balanced way.

UPDATE 20.04.2010: http://infosecurityguard.com has been disabled. Notrax identity became known to several guys in the voice security environments (cannot tell, but you can imagine, i was right!) and so our friends decided to trow away the website because of legal responsibility under UK and USA laws.

Following my discoveries, Mr. Hafner, SecurStar chief exec, tried to ultimately defend their actions, citing absolutely unreasonable excuses to The Reg instead of publicly apologizing for what they have done: creating a fake independent security research to promote their PhoneCrypt product.

He tried to convince us that the person behind IP 217.7.213.59, used by the author of infosecurityguard.com and pointing to their office DSL line, was this hacker Notrax, using their anonymous surfing service and not one of their employees at their office:

“SecurStar chief exec Wilfried Hafner denied any contact with Notrax. Notrax, he said, must have been using his firm’s anonymous browsing service, SurfSolo, to produce the results reported by Pietrosanti”

On 217.7.213.59 they have installed their VoIP/Asterisk PBX and internet gateway

They promote their anonymous proxy service for “Anonymous p2p use” (http://www.securstar.com/products_ssolo.php). Who would let users do p2p from the office dsl line where they have installed their corporate VoIP PBX ? If you do VoIP you can’t let third party flood your line w/ p2p traffic, your phone calls would became obviously unreliable (yes, yes, you can do QoS, but you would not place an anonymous navigation proxy on your company office DSL line…).

Which company providing an anonymous navigation service would ever use their own office IP address? Just think how many times you would have the police knocking at your door and your employees as the prime suspects. (In past i used to run a TOR node, i know the risks…). Also think how many times you would find yourself blacklisted on google as a spyware bot.

Mr. Hafner also says “We have two million people using this product. Or he may have been an old customer of ours”. 2M users on a DSL line, really?

I don’t use Surfsolo service, however their proxies are probably these ones:

surfsolo.securstar.net – 67.225.141.74

surfsolo.securstar.com – 69.16.211.133

Frankly speaking I can easily understand that Mr. Hafner is going do whatever he can to protect his company from the scandal, but the “anonymous proxy” excuse is at the very least suspicious.

How does the fact that the “independent research” was semantically a product review of PhoneCrypt, along with the discovery that the author come from the SecurStar GmbH IP address offices, along with the anonymity of this Notrax guy (SecurStar calls him a “well known it security professional” in their press release..) sound to you?

It’s possible that earth will get an attack from outer space that’s going to destroy our life?

Statistically extremely difficult, but yes, possible. More or less like the “anonymous proxy” story told by Mr. Hafner to cover the fact that they are the ones behind the infosecurityguard.com fake “independent security review”.

Hey, I don’t need anything else to convince myself or to let the smart person have his own thoughts on this.

I just think that the best way for SecurStar to get out of this mess would probably be to provide public excuses to the hacking community for abusing the name and reputation of real independent security researches, for the sake of a marketing stunt.

Regards,

Fabio Pietrosanti

p.s. I am currently waiting for some other infos that will more precisely confirm that what Mr. Hafner is saying is not properly true. Stay tuned.

When you read a link going from a website to another one there is an HTTP protocol header, the “Referral”, that tell you from which page someone is going to another webpage.

The referral demonstrated that the authors of http://infosecurityguard.com read my post, because it was coming from http://infosecurityguard.com/wp-admin/edit-comments.php that’s the webpage you use as a wordpress author/editor to approve/refuse comments. And here there was the link.

The SecurStar GmbH PBX is open on the internet, it contains all the names of their employee and confirm us that the author of http:/infosecurityguard.com is that company and is the anonymous hacker called Notrax.

They sell secure telephony but their company telephony system is openly vulnerable on the internet. :-)

I was thinking to call the CEO, Hafner, via SIP on his internal desktop PBX to announce we discovered him tricks.. :->

They measured their marketing activity

Looking at the logs of my website i found that they was sensing the google distribution of information for the following keywords, in order to understand how effectively they was able to attack competing products. It’s reasonable, if you invest money in a marketing campaign you want to see the results :-)

Notrax hacker does not exist on google
As you know any hacker that get public usually have presence of it’s activity on google, attending mailinglists, forum, homepage, past research, participation to conferences, etc, etc.
The fake hacker that they wanted us to to think was writing an independent blog does NOT have any trace on google. Only some hit about an anonymous browser called Notrax but nothing about that hacker.
Maybe when SecurStar provided the anonymity tool to their marketing agency, to help them protecting anonymity for the fake research, their provided them the anonymous browser notrax.So the marketing guy thinking about the nickname of this fake hackers used what? Notrax! :-)

The “independent review”completely oriented in publicizing PhoneCrypt

Of the various review don the phonecrypt review is only positive and amazing good feedback, while the other are only bad feedback and no single good point.

As you can imagine, in any kind of independent product evaluation, for all products there are goods and bad points. No. In this one there are only product that are good and product that are bad.

They missed to consider the security of the technology used by the products

They completely avoided to speak about cryptography and security of the products.

They do not evaluated basic security features that must be in that kind of products.That’s in order not to let anyone see that they did not followed basic security rules in building up their PhoneCrypt.
The technology is closed source, no transparency on algorithms and protocols, no peer review.Read my new comparison (from the basic cryptographic requirement point of view) About the voice encryption analysis (criteria, errors and different results) .
The results are somehow different than their one .

UPDATE: Who’s Wilfried Hafner (SecurStar founder) ?

I got a notice from a reader regarding Wilfred Hafner, SecurStar founder, CEO and security expert.

”falsely claiming or creating the impression that the trader is not acting for the purposes relating to his trade, business, craft or profession, or falsely representing oneself as a consumer” is a criminal offense.

IANAL, but I would not be surpised if someone filed a criminal complaint or start civil litigation for unfair competition against SecurStar GmbH.
Whether this is going to be a matter for criminal and/or civil Courts or not is not that important. However, it is clear enough that SecurStar GmbH appears to be at least ethically questionable and not really worth of trust.

Nice try, gentlemen… however, next time just do it right (whether “right” for them means “in a honest manner” or “in a fashion not to be caught” I will let them choose)”

I would like to provide considerations on the concept of ethics that a security company should have respect to the users, the media and the security environment.

SecurStar GmbH made very bad things making that infosecuriguard.com fake independent research.

It’s unfair approach respect to hacking community.

It’s unfair marketing to end user. They should not be tricking by creating fake independent review.

It’s unfair competition in the security market.

Let’s make some more important consideration on this.

Must be serious on cryptographic products. They are not toys

When you do cryptographic tools you should be really aware of what you are doing, you must be really serious.

If you do bad crypto people could die.

If you don’t follow basic security rules for transparency and securityfor cryptographyyou are putting people life at risk.

You are taking the responsibility of this. (I want to sleep at night, don’t think SecurStar CEO/CTO care about this…)

Security research need reference and transparency

Security research have to be public, well done, always subject to public discussion and cooperation.
Security research should not be instrumentally used for marketing purpose.Security research should be done for awareness and grow of the knowledge of the worldwide security environment.

Hacking environment is neutral, should not be used instrumentally

Hackers are considered neutral, nerds, doing what they do for their pleasure and passion.

If you work in the security market you work with hackers.

If you use hackers and hacking environment for your own marketing purposes you are making something very nasty.

Hackers give you the technology and knowledge and you use them for your own commercial purpose.

Consideration on the authority of the information online

That’s something that pose serious consideration on the authority of information online.An anonymous hacker, with no reference online, made a product security review that appear like an independent one. I have to say that the fake review was very well prepared, it always posed good/bad things in an indirect way. It did not appeared to me at 1st time like a fake. But going deeply i found what’s going on.

However Journalists, news media and blogger went to the TRAP and reviewed their fake research. TheRegister, NetworkWorld and a lot of blogs reported it. Even if the author was completely anonymous.